The Farmhand: News from Sanborn Mills Farm

In a summer that has been like no other at Sanborn Mills Farm — cancelled programming, restrictions on visitations, etc. — there are still appearances of normal. The gardens bloomed again in their rainbow of colors. A fine crop of hay was baled. The carpentry team built a new maintenance shed (see second story in this edition) and now a new barn on the Merrill Farm at the upper end of Sanborn Mills Farm is going up.

And new summer interns have spent our warm days working alongside Farm Manager Ray Ramsey and Infrastructure Manager Kevin A. Schurman. They arrived at the end of May and will continue to work at the Farm through the end of August. 

Kevin’s interns are Matt Dougherty and Kevin Damon-Cronmiller. Both come from the North Bennett Street School, the craft school in Boston with which Sanborn Mills Farm has had a long relationship. 

	Infrastructure Manager Kevin A. Schurman with summer interns Matt Dougherty and Kevin Damon-Cronmiller.

Kevin had some interning experience in Vermont before coming to the Farm, where he says he has loved the varieties of carpentry he’s learning

 under Kevin’s tutelage, including window-making, building barn doors for the new maintenance shed, and timber-framing. “I spent a few days down at the sawmill, making lumber out of logs, and that was like, wow, outer space,” he says. “I don’t know where else you could get experience like that.” 

Kevin points out that interns at the Farm learn at their own pace. “It’s not a production situation here,” he comments. “It’s all about them, about what they want to learn.”

Madison St. George, working with Ray, got to know the Farm through her friendship with Ray’s daughter Emma. With Tyler Allen, she works with the Farm’s oxen, something she’s an old hand at. At home in Pittsfield, her family raises oxen; right now Madison looks after 10 head at home in addition to the two pair at Sanborn Mills Farm.

“I like the way you can control them,” she says, a remarkable comment from a teenager who is outweighed by a single ox by probably 1,500 pounds, if not more. “You can teach them when they’re calves and they will respond to you all their lives.” A student at Pittsfield High School, Madison is thinking about becoming a livestock veterinarian when she’s an adult. Working at the Farm, she’s also been introduced to gardening by flower gardener Michelle Smith, working in the gardens beside gardener Jenn Merrill. “I had no idea how much work it is,” she says. “But the results are amazing.”

Lara Weise was born on a small farm in Germany and moved to Pennsylvania with her mother and brother when she was 12. She began studies at Sterling College in Vermont in 2017, majoring in agricultural education with a minor in draft animal power systems. At Sanborn Mills Farm this summer, Lara worked with Ray and the farm crew to learn how to drive oxen with and without equipment.

“I have always lived on a farm, worked on a farm or lived adjacent to a farm,” she says, “and so working in agriculture in some sort of capacity was always a goal of mine.” She will graduate from Sterling in May of 2021, and her experience at Sanborn Mills Farm makes her think that a career working with draft animals just might be her true calling.

Eric Schurman is interning in carpentry at Sanborn Mills Farm this summer with his father, Infrastructure Manager Kevin A. Schurman. (Eric’s brother, Kevin M. Schurman, is Operations Manager at the Farm.) Carpentry is a family tradition; Eric follows his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father in woodworking.

“After I got out of the Army I wanted to learn a trade, and this was a natural fit,” he says. He’s been doing some timber-framing at the Farm this summer as well as building chairs for Fifield Hall and the new dining room. The three days a week he spends at the Farm offset the three days a week he works at BA Systems in Nashua, a microelectronics company. “What I like about doing carpentry here is that I’m working with my hands,” Eric comments as he adjusts a new chain mortiser he’s using to cut mortises in posts for a barn at the Merrill Farm at the upper part of Sanborn Mills Farm. “There’s a lot of satisfaction in it.”